Winner of the 1991 Bumbershoot Award for fiction, Sorrowful Mysteries and Other Stories is a collection of quirky, vividly drawn tales by Kentucky native Normandi Ellis. Alternately funny, odd, and disturbing, the stories depict characters struggling to understand the mysteries of life and death. A woman speaks to her dead husband through a television set. A music professor falls into a hidden limestone cave beneath his backyard and discovers that he wants to stay there. A boy obsessively hunts a fox as he tries to understand his older cousin’s experience in Vietnam. Even the minor characters—a wolf-boy from a circus sideshow, a midget who believes everything is possible, a Puerto Rican tomboy—immediately spring to life in the reader’s imagination.